Bob Neal
“Process,” the professor told us, “makes policy.”
The class was American politics, and we were there to learn just how our government works.
Since that lesson in 1967, I have seen process determining policy time and again, for better and for worse. And not only in government.
Any liberal will tell you that voters want lots of services from their government but don’t want to pay for them. Any conservative will tell you the government tries to do too much, especially too much of things it can’t do well. Of course, both are correct.
Let’s look at some good examples, both recent and not so recent.
Boredom and a sore butt took over Tuesday — how many back issues of The New Yorker and The Atlantic can one read before the backside says, “no more” — so I took a spin to see how storm recovery was going. Turned out to be a 198-mile spin.
Two major events coincided when that southern wind carried in up to 7.6 inches (in Newry) of rain and 5.16 in Farmington, 11 miles from me. The storm left water, water everywhere. My tour of the area took me through places that had lost all electricity.
In some, the response had been swift and helpful. Where stoplights weren’t working, the cities of Gardiner and Lewiston had put out stop signs at the corners, which kept traffic moving and, no doubt, reduced the number of accidents and road rage.
I didn’t see those temporary stop signs anywhere else, and I don’t know whether Gardiner and Lewiston policies call for them or whether those in charge of process, the public works departments, did it on their own. If the latter, they made it policy.
Later in the day, water started flooding low-lying areas. As the water rose, process responded. Volunteer firefighters and road commissioners got the signs out, set up traffic cones around the shallower puddles and closed swamped roads in Farmington, Jay, New Sharon and later Auburn and Lewiston. That all seems standard, but I point it out to show the importance of process.
Almost lost in the news of the storm was news from the Wiscasset School Department, where the superintendent and the principal of the middle school have been wrangling for months. The school committee learned on Wednesday, the Sun Journal reported, that the principal had set up a hidden camera in a room students used to change clothes. The principal said she put through a request to set up a camera, knowing that the IT director (the superintendent) would see them.
The superintendent said she never saw the request, which went right to the “IT team.” So, as the process unfolded, despite the policy of requests going to the IT director, this one didn’t. Perfect example of process making policy, and the process rewrote the policy.
On a higher level (or lower, depending on your perspective), we also see process dictate policy.
At state and federal levels, the usual procedure is that the legislature enacts a law empowering an agency to meet a set of goals. The task goes to the agency, which “writes a rule” — you know that’s government-speak for “writes tons of rules” — to apply the law. Then the law takes effect.
Or does it? Take the two most recent presidents. NPR reported on Thursday about efforts to raise the efficiency of home appliances. Environmental and civil rights policy were widely ignored by the Trump administration, so it seems the Biden people are piling on rules. In reality, a four-year hiatus in applying rules built up a backlog, as Biden’s people see it, that must be cleared.
An aside. As a meat-producing farmer, I never minded new rules on appliances. Especially on refrigeration. In fact, I learned never to buy used refrigeration. Advances in efficiency came so fast that I always saved money, not to mention having trouble-free years, by buying new.
The Biden administration is rightly criticized for not ignoring immigration policy. In 2021, Biden stopped applying the “public charge” rule, instituted under Trump, that banned green cards (work permits) for immigrants who might use such public programs as Medicaid. “Public charge” was not a legislative policy, but it was established by executive order.
So, simply by refusing to apply a rule, process is changing policy.
Finally, in the private sector, we sometimes see process making policy during labor disputes. Sometimes, rather than go on strike, union workers will work strictly by the book. So, if the book (policy) says two workers are needed to use a step ladder (process), one worker won’t go up the ladder until a second arrives to steady it.
The best examples I’ve seen are in the book “Rivethead” by Ben Hamper. Published in 1991, “Rivethead” shows how autoworkers control policy by using process. The policy in a factory might be to turn out 1,500 cars per shift. But management may set rules making it impossible or unsafe to produce that many.
So, assemblers apply the policy on their own by control of process.
Bob Neal used to tell new employees, “Learn to do it my way. Then if you can improve on that, do it.” The best employees were those who figured out how to improve the “his way” process. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.
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